on wednesday STEP lab lunch we had a very impressive demonstration of root whiteboard robots see the kickstarter project at http://kck.st/2exVd9T. Basically these are magnetic robots which come with their own programming environment for kids and which you can program to drive on your white board, draw on it, whipe it clean ;-). They have sensors for detecting what is drawn on the board, they can detect different colours, they can detect when they bump into each other and much more. Ah ja they can of course also indicate things with light and sound.

Interesting is also that you can modify the code real time and of course can code several of the whiteboard crawlers at a time from a tablet device. The team has also introduced different levels of cosing from very simple rules to real code and you can program it in different languages as Swift and Python.

For me the really interesting aspect is also the placement as a robot on the whiteboard, to say the natural habitat of the teacher communication with the students. So this might be an interesting approach also for linking the black/whiteboard with coding and new technology in a simple way. Personally I would have loved one in school and if is just would have been to code it to clean the whiteboard ;-).

So lets support root! Get yours soon.